International Retail Bank
North American Mobile Communications Spend Management

Business Challenge

As a part of their effort to reduce costs, our client (a global retail bank with over $73 billion in revenue) targeted their telecommunications spend on voice, data, and cellular services in the U.S.  These costs had been escalating rapidly and the processes by which they managed these costs were complicated.

• Employees were using 6 national mobile service providers with 3,600 mobile data devices and 3,500 mobile voice devices, using many different types of handsets and with varying tariff structures for each service provider.
• Each business unit separately managed its users' cellular services and applied its own policies and purchase procedures.
• Each business unit negotiated its own equipment pricing and tariff structures.
• There was no monitoring of call traffic trends to identify the best tariffs based on usage patterns.
• There were no best practices in place regarding when to use a corporate cellular device and when to use other forms of communication.

The Solution

Acumen Solutions was engaged to help select a smaller group of approved mobile vendors and to structure a set of agreements that allowed for the highest possible discount, without locking the client into commitment levels that were too high to allow for future changes in usage patterns.  In order to achieve this, Acumen Solutions

• Analyzed the corporate usage data that was available, supplementing this with reasonable assumptions to baseline the current usage and levels of spending
• Leveraged the corporate usage data and developed several usage profiles that could be extrapolated to account for future growth
• Provided Strategic Sourcing for the client by:
  • Developing a series of RFPs to negotiate increased discounts at achievable commitment levels
  • Utilizing “bulk” purchase offerings such as corporate minutes, pooled minutes, and roll-over minutes to decrease the number of unused minutes per month

Once the spend and vendor selection was optimized, we developed a series of processes and procedures for the client to follow to ensure that they quickly identified exceptionally high usage and could take action to prevent it going forward.

Return on Investment

Using the above supplier relationship management and strategic sourcing strategies, Acumen Solutions helped reduce the client’s $5.7 million spend on mobile services by 15%-20% while optimizing the plan that each person had based on individual usage patterns. The client was able to maintain the flexibility required by its mobile users while proactively managing its mobile communications spend.

International Retail Bank: North American Mobile Communications Spend Management (PDF)